Tax credits to parents, tax credits to those sponsoring a child, and tax credits to those donating to private voucher foundations would ease the transition.
Eventually, parents would pay for their own child's education. Charity would take care of the poor.
The only children who would likely need government welfare would be the catastrophically handicapped child,...but,..even those expenses could and should be covered with private insurance for this very sad event.
Can American's afford it? Yes, they can. We spend more on government K-12 education (state,federal, and local) each year than we do on the military, and we are a war in Iraq. This does not include what we are spending on government welfare for college.
If government were to get completely out of the education business, those add up to **significant** tax credits to parents and others that are more than enough to ease the transition.
The Scientologists will have a field day.
I don’t know if I would agree with you that government should not be involved in education at some level (I MAY agree, but that isn’t my point), but I do believe that college education should not be “for the masses.” It should be reserved for truly higher education. Much of what is taught in colleges and universities today hardly qualifies as higher education.
Somewhere along the line it was determined that every child should go to college. The result is a dilution of college curricula so as to allow “success” for the students.
Post-high school education is needed in today’s markets, but that shouldn’t mean college in most cases. Technical education is the most efficient means of getting people ready to work in technical areas, as well as trades. Many, really most, students have no business studying economics, philosophy and literature in a formal setting (at least the way those subjects used to be taught), just so that they can learn, for example, computer skills needed to work in industry.